Surfing The Web to Crash on Couches

STORY AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEELY KILLEBREW

The Meeting

A heavy blanket of fog rolled over the quiet Greenlake on Sunday morning, the city of Seattle quiet as ambitious runners wiped sleep from their eyes and took to the trail with their sneakers padding softly. Only a gentle drizzle of footsteps falling along the lake path could be heard. In a coffee shop just off Greenlake Drive, unbeknownst to many, a group of strangers gathered together, stickers with “Hello, my name is…” plastered to cardigans, sweaters and polo shirts. The organizer, a bright-eyed woman named Shelly, chattered through bites of a cheese pastry, introducing herself to everyone that walked through the doors into the cement lounge.

This coffee shop is where strangers converge to talk about couch surfing. Globetrotters and alternative travelers, lovers of the world, a melting pot and a hodgepodge of humans that love humanity and gather for the sake of gathering.

The organization that brings them together, couchsurfing.com, is one of many communities built upon the desire to travel in a way that allows members to meet people from the area they are staying. Similar online communities can be found at HelpX.com, an international work exchange website, and warmshowers.org, a platform that helps touring bicyclists find hosts. A serendipitous email in 2004 to a group of students in Iceland brought founders Casey Fenton, Daniel Hoffer, Sebastian Le Tuan, and Leonardo Bassani da Silveira together to form the organization of over 10 million travelers and hosts, with representatives from 683 cities and 180 languages.

Nate Gray

In a creaky garage-turned- office in south Bellingham, Nate Gray reclines on a worn sofa as he tells of his adventures. Each gesture is animated with a cup of coffee in one hand and a toothy grin beaming through a full beard. Nate discovered couch surfing while on a road trip three summers ago and grew to love seeing the places he traveled through the lens of his hosts. After hearing about warmshowers.org, Nate hosted seven groups of bikers at his home in Bellingham, learning about bike touring vicariously through the travelers.

From a Canadian bike polo and exotic mushroom enthusiast, to a woman from Portugal who worked seasonally for the U.S. Parks Service and then traveled in her time off; it was almost as if Nate could travel through meeting the incredible people that would show up on his doorstep, taken along on their journeys through their anecdotes of adventures.

When it came time to start planning his cross-country trip to benefit Urban Blazers, an organization that gives underprivileged kids the opportunity to learn about conservation through outdoor activities, Nate and his riding buddy Erik Swanson knew they could use warmshowers.org as a tool to stay on budget. With $19 per day for food and beer, the duo alternated between warmshowers.org, friends’ homes, camping, and occasionally meeting random people who offered their homes.“We didn’t have many rules… we just wanted to let it flow naturally, but one of the only rules we did have was never pay for a place to sleep, and we didn’t,” Nate says.

They would spend 80 days riding over 4,300 miles to raise $10,000 for the organization. On the day that Nate and Eric sent out a request to stay with Elizabeth in Ithaca, New York, they had already biked over 2,000 miles across the country. Of the dozens of people they met, Elizabeth stood out. She was in the process of getting her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and just a few months before had ridden across the country to teach science to underprivileged kids. On her profile, she offered her hospitality and a phone number, saying not to worry about last minute requests. That day, Nate and Eric’s other arrangements fell through, and they sent Elizabeth a text message to see if she could host.

Elizabeth was in class all day, but it didn’t matter. “She had never met us,” Nate says. “She put the key in the mailbox, a six-pack of beer in the fridge, and pasta out on the counter for us to cook… The whole nine yards.” Elizabeth had a tiny little studio apartment, where the pair blew up an air mattress and slept in her kitchen for a few days. There were some people that hosted them in a guesthouse, and there were some people that had a kitchen floor, but what each person offered didn’t matter. They simply wanted to help, to put a roof over the head of two tired bikers.

Erica Reed

Erica Reed is a gentle, doe-eyed poet and graduate of Western’s creative writing department, and as she perches on a floral armchair nestled below a cloud-painted ceiling in Espresso Avellino she seems completely content with where she is; at peace.

She has, however, been many other places — from Iceland to Morocco to the United Kingdom. Beginning in 2008, at 18-years- old, the high school graduate desired to stretch her wings and experience her freedom in Europe. When her travelling partner learned about couchsurfing.com through a relative, Erica created a profile for the pair to explore countries the couch surfing way, attracted by the prospective of free accommodations. Now, looking back through years of surfing and hosting, she realizes that it was not until years later that she came to terms with the full impact and value that couch surfing would have on her life.

More than 30 people have stayed at her home in Bellingham — travelers from France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Canada, to name a few. At one point, a band brought home friends late in the night to sleep. In the morning before classes, her roommates tiptoed around 15 people sprawled throughout their living room; one guy snoring on a couch completely naked, curled around a giant stuffed animal.

As for hosting and traveling, Erica emphasizes care in choosing people to interact with on the website. When she was hosting at her home in Bellingham, she made a point to check with roommates and forward references and profile links.

“I don’t want to say common sense, because that implies that if you just use common sense then you can avoid all danger, but being safe is a lot of attention to detail and how people word their profiles,” Erica says.

There were people that they rejected because of the way they worded their requests. A host or travelers could even be rejected for their 50 positive references and one negative, if that one negative rang a small alarm bell.

That is the beauty of the platform, that you are never required to interact with another person. When traveling, Erica never found herself in a position where she absolutely had to depend on a host to have a place to stay- there were always hostels or hotels; a better option than finding yourself in a hostile environment.

Part of the couch surfing process that is so impactful to the users can also be precarious: it forces travelers and hosts to trust strangers, and demands them to stretch their boundaries of comfort with other people. For Erica, it meant learning to say no and be okay with having to be impolite to protect herself and home. “I think sometimes a lot of women in our culture will allow their personal boundaries to be stretched because they don’t want to insult or offend, and couch surfing really taught me to be able to staunchly protect my comfort zone and my household’s comfort zone,” Erica says.

Erica has never had a negative experience, but she acknowledges that there were times when she hosted or was hosted by someone that she would probably never see again, and that was fine by her. On the other end, some of her dearest friends blossomed from meeting through surfing.

On one occasion, a surfer from Sweden stayed at her house and then met her in Budapest a year later. After their trip, he went to Australia. Another surfer from the U.S. also stayed with Erica and then went to Australia. Months later, one returned and told Erica about a potluck she had attended where the guy sitting next to her started a conversation that lead them to both realize that not only had they both been traveling in the U.S. and Washington that past year, they also realized both had stayed in Bellingham with Erica. Both surfers had slept on the same exact couch in her living room and now were meeting nearly a year and 8,000 miles later, in complete serendipity.